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• pergoogle just posts screenshots of google image searches.  It’s kind of fun.  Above is the google image search of that website.
• Over 70% of my blog traffic this week is coming from the google image search for “oral sex”.

My two best ideas this week

1. A cross between battleship and hangman, played with two scrabble boards.
2. There’s an important paper on modality called What ‘must’ and ‘can’ must and can mean.  Someone should write a paper in response to it and called it What “What ‘must and ‘can’ must and can mean” must and can mean.  This isn’t particularly likely, since the paper is kind of old, but if the response paper was good enough, then we can just keep going like that.

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• Above, is the Google trends chart for the search term “google trends”
• The OKCupid profile “OKCupid” is a married 35-year-old who seems to work for OKCupid.  We’re a 90% match, OKCupid and I.
• The word most frequently looked up on Cambridge Dictionary’s online dictionary was “dictionary” (for December 2009, the most recent month I could find).
• The Wikipedia entry for Wikipedia was the fifteenth most frequently visited Wikipedia article of in 2009, the year I found most easily.  It is between Deaths in 2009 and United States.
• There are no synonyms for “thesaurus”.
• The search term “google” gets nearly 12 trillion hits on Google, which is more than “free”, “news”, or “adult”, but less than “facebook”.

According to wikipedia, northern pike feed on perch, and perch feed on bleak.  These facts will be important.  And for pike to feed on perch, it must also be true that pike catch perch, and to catch a fish is to fish a fish, clearly.  So it would be factually accurate to say that:

1. Pike fish perch.
2. Perch fish bleak.
3. Pike are fish.
4. Perch are fish that pike fish. (by 1)
5. Bleak are fish that perch fish. (by 2)
6. Perch are fish pike fish. (by 4, just dropping the “that”)
7. Bleak are fish perch fish. (by 5, just dropping the “that”)
8. Bleak are fish fish pike fish fish. (by 4 and 5)
9. Fish pike fish fish fish fish pike fish fish. (by 2, 7, and 8)
10. Fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish. (by 3 and 9)

You got that right.  The sentence “Fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish fish.” means roughly the same thing as “perch feed on bleak”.  If you consider freshwater shrimp to be fish, things get way way crazier.

[The tree was made using phpSyntaxTree.  The e’s are phonologically null traces in the relative clauses—they are semantically linked to the fish that heads the NP where the RC attaches.]

Buffalo people buffalo people

I saw Greenberg a little while ago, and the “Hurt people hurt people” line really stuck with me.  Not the sentiment, but the language.  It’s a pretty gorgeous construction.  There are very few verbs where the bare form is the same as the past participle, and even when that happens, you still need a transitive verb that can take the same type of subject and object (“Put people put people” doesn’t make any sense, for instance).

I searched a list of irregular verbs and came up with the following:

• Cut people cut people.
• Hit people hit people.
• Fit people fit people.
• Broadcast people broadcast people.

Not nearly as good.  Of course, if you don’t care about a generic reading, we can just change the tense to the past and get all sorts of stuff.  Consider a situation in which disoriented men and women began saying gibberish, which then disorients the others around them.  It seems appropriate to describe that situation as:

• Confused people confused people.

And since the past participle and past tense almost always agree, examples like this will show up all over the place.

Much more fun: is when you use homophonous homonyms, or nouns with a related verb sense.  Here are a three with animals:

• Residents of a city in upstate New York are bullies: Buffalo people buffalo people.
• Canine pet owners are persistent: Dog people dog people.
• Ursine-human hybrids have a tendency to carry regular humans: Bear-people bear people.

And best of all, I have constructed a buffalo sentence!  Consider a situation in which extroverts are perpetually living inside other human beings.  Then we’d definitely want to say:

• People people people people.

A thought, continued

Today in class, we were doing some crazy stuff with higher order logic (probably not too crazy as far as HOL goes, but the stuff is just hard to wrap your head around).  We were dealing with three separate levels of objects that were interacting, so obviously I thought about Inception.  I mention this mostly to stress how I definitely was not stoned when I came up with the following revision to yesterday’s Day Break/Groundhog Day idea (I mean, I wouldn’t be stoned anyways, obviously, but that fact just seems worth making explicit):

Alright, let’s say in the universe of Inception, someone spends 24 hours in a dream.  You’ll recall that in the universe of Inception, five minutes in “real” time take an hour in dream time.  That’s a multiple of 20, for 20 days of dream time.  Just assume this happens within the movie, so if you watch Inception, this 20 day dream occurs.

Now, inside that dream, for reasons that probably don’t make a great deal of sense, there is a television that continuously loops the entire season of Day Break.  There are 12 episodes.  Let’s assume there are commercials, so that’s 2 seasons of Day Break per day.  So if you watch Inception, 40 seasons of Day Break are contained within.

Now, yesterday we assumed Taye Diggs lived the same day for ten straight years.  Maybe that was too high.  Let’s call it one year.  So then, each day in the Inception dream, Taye Diggs lives the same day 730 times (or 14,600 days each time you watch Inception).

As per yesterday, I think it’s within reason to assume someone is watching Groundhog Day on the repeated day in Day Break.  And as per yesterday, Bill Murray repeats Groundhog Day for ten years, or 3,650 days.  That is about 1.3 million days per season of Day Break, so 2.6 million per day of Inception dream time, and 53 million Groundhog days per viewing of Inception.

One last step.  On the Groundhog Day that Bill Murray relives 3,650 times, there probably is a kid reading The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe from cover to cover.  That story, of course, takes place in a few days of earth time, but Peter, Lucy, Susan, and Edmond spend something like 20 years in Narnia.

So what I’m trying to tell you is that every time you watch Inception, 1.07 billion years pass in Narnia.

A thought

The remainder of my Groundhog Day will be spent watching Day Break, which is a fun coincidence.  For those unaware, Day Break was a television show that borrowed the premise from Groundhog Day, but instead of Bill Murray, it stars Taye Diggs as someone who’s been framed for murder.  It’s perhaps even more excellent than it sounds.  I’m about halfway through.  I’ll be done by Friday.

Here’s my idea: in any given day, someone somewhere probably watches the movie Groundhog Day.  From this we can assume that within the universe of Day Break, someone is watching Groundhog Day.  Assuming it takes Taye Diggs as long to right the world as it did Bill Murray, then Murray’s character will have lived the same day over 13 million times in a single day.  It’s basically like there being a wardrobe within Narnia.  I don’t know what to do with this idea, but I plan to do something.

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If anyone knows anyone at NBC, I’ve got an awesome idea for a TV show:  It takes place at a fictionalized NBC that has a fictionalized Saturday Night Live show.  Then, they decide to develop two shows that take place behind the scenes of fictionalized fictionalized SNL at the same time.  After that things get pretty crazy.

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Recursion In Fun Places:

Depending on how you count, every fifth or sixth step of the Hokey Pokey is to “do the Hokey Pokey”.

This means we’ve all been doing the Hokey Pokey wrong.  When you get to the first “do the Hokey Pokey” step, it seems as though the correct thing to is do is to follow instructions and put your right foot in all over again.  Because of this: 1) once you start the “Hokey Pokey” it never ends, and 2) you never even get to turn yourself around, let alone move any body parts other than your right foot.